Team Lead and Software Engineer living and working in Hamburg, Germany. Daytime Engineering Team Lead at Jimdo and passionate about software, design, people, and vegan food.

After 17 years of creating websites, I still enjoy most parts of developing and designing applications for the web. You can find all public projects on GitHub, for example, Timesheet.js with more than six thousand Stargazers. The most interesting recent projects are hanu for writing Slack bots or the CLI Notes example project to manage text notes from the command line. Lately, I published a few plugins for serverless, you will find them on GitHub.

Before leading, managing, and mentoring engineers at Jimdo, I was delighted to work as a Senior Engineer for Elephant Seven in Hamburg, Creative Technologist at the Intuity Media Lab in Hamburg and Stuttgart, and Lead Engineer and Scrum Master for Roamsys in Trier.

My passion for sharing thoughts and spreading knowledge has been strengthened with building up MACNOTES back in 2006 until we sold the project some years later …

AWS Lambda functions together with an Amazon Kinesis Stream offer a great way to process continuous information. I created an example project called Serverless Analytics to demonstrate this. You can use this as the starting point to create your very own Google Analytics clone and run it serverless and hopefully maintenance-free on Amazon.

Since a few days, Amazon provides a native way to enable Auto Scaling for DynamoDB tables! Luckily the settings can be configured using CloudFormation templates, and so I wrote a plugin for serverless to easily configure Auto Scaling without having to write the whole CloudFormation configuration.

When you use a serverless environment for your service (and you should!), chances are high you might be using the Serverless framework and may end up in a situation like me with the need to process the AWS CloudFormation Stack Output after deploying the service.

Have you ever wondered how to process messages from SQS without maintaining infrastructure? Amazon Web Services perfectly support SNS as a trigger for AWS Lambda functions, but with SQS you have to find a custom solution. This tutorial will show an experimental setup using Serverless to read messages from an SQS queue and build auto-scaling worker processes.

If you read my first article about Amazon Alexa and AWS Lambda, you already know how to deploy a custom Alexa skill using Apex. With this article, you will learn how to use the Serverless framework to deploy a function to AWS Lambda and invoke it with your Amazon Echo using voice commands.

It’s a recurring task in software development to forecast the amount of time something will take. There are Roadmap Meetings, Sprint Planning Meetings or even the spontaneous estimates you must provide in the hallway. All of them require you to pull out your divining rod and predict the future.

After watching all Mr. Robot episodes, I somehow felt the need to buy an Amazon Echo and get introduced to Alexa. Luckily Amazon sent me an invite to buy Echo just a couple of days before Christmas and so I got the perfect gift for myself and an awesome reason to spend some time coding during the Christmas holidays.

On the past few friday evenings I started to write a side-project to get going with server and client development using Go. The result is the CLI Notes project for managing text notes from the command line. All code for hosting the API server and building the needed client application is available at GitHub using the GPL license.

After attending a talk at the GitHub Universe 2016 about Hubot, I felt the need to write a little Go library to speed up my process of creating bots for Slack. With hanu you can get started with the buzzword ChatOps in seconds. The final bot will be running on Heroku using a worker dyno, but of course this works fine on your local machine as well …

It only takes a couple of minutes to deploy a go application to a free Heroku dyno, use a custom domain name and enable free SSL using CloudFlare. If you still have some seconds left - and you will - it’s dead simple to add Prometheus metrics as well.

It’s not a secret you can easily host any static website on Amazon S3 without cryptic configuration. When you add CloudFront for HTTPS delivery and the Amazon Certificate Manager for free SSL certificates you will get a neat setup.

The release of a static website, no matter of which complexity, always comes with the question of how? Of course nobody likes to write plain HTML and CSS, or use a system without the possibility to include and re-use common lines of code.